Nowadays (well actually this has been true for the last 10 years) a normal user won't care about that extra perf ratio. The Aspire is "fast enough".

I'm gonna go out on a limb and guess we're also looking at 10 hr battery vs 1hr battery.

No brand new laptop has a 1h battery. Also, battery life importance as in "I can work a full day unplugged from AC" it's something that affects only a subset of laptop users, and mostly during some specific conditions (i.e. long travels).